A Sermon
Presented by Rev. Merlin T. Batt
Interim Pastor
St. Matthew’s United Church of Christ
At Maiden, North Carolina
On the Third Sunday in Ordinary Time
January 21, 2007

Scriptures Lessons:  Nehemiah 8 (selected verses); Luke 4:14-21
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Our Scripture readings this morning get us involved in two events, events widely separated in time, but closely connected in theme. In the first one, we find ourselves standing amidst a crowd gathered in Jerusalem in the year 458 B.C. That’s nearly 2,500 years ago!

You need to know a little bit about the background of this gathering to appreciate what’s going on here. The people of Israel have been called together by a Jewish priest named Ezra to hear him read from an ancient scroll found by workmen rebuilding the walls of Jerusalem, walls which had been toppled a little over a hundred years before when the city was destroyed and the people taken into exile in Babylon, present-day Iraq.

The exile had lasted about 50 years, after which some of the people made their way back to Jerusalem which had been devastated by warfare and subsequent neglect. Then another half century passed. For the Jews who returned from exile these were years filled with disappointment, conflict, confusion, and one setback after another.

Then, one day, a workman busy rebuilding the city wall moved to one side a large chunk of fallen masonry, and there before his eyes was a large scroll made of animal skin and encased in fine cloth. He summoned a few of his co-workers, and when they opened the scroll very carefully they discovered it was a Torah scroll, that is, a scroll containing at least a part of what we know as the first five books of the Bible – Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy.

You see, for more than a hundred years, the people of Israel had survived the exile and the return to their land without having the written story of Israel’s God, YHWH, creating the world, calling Abraham and his descendants to be the people through whom this God would redeem his creation, guiding his people through their generations, bringing them out of slavery in Egypt, and leading them through servants like Moses and Aaron back to their land with the stern reminder, “Take care that you do not forget the Lord, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery. The Lord your God you shall fear; him you shall serve…Do not follow other gods, any of the gods of the peoples who are all around you…”
 
But soon they did. They forgot the Lord their God. They followed other gods. And as a result, they forget who they were, and they forgot whose they were. It was, in fact, their forgetting the Lord their God and rejecting his ways that brought about the destruction of their land and their bitter exile.

And now they were assembled in their holy city Jerusalem before one of its gates, the Water Gate, and as they stood in silence, they heard Ezra, standing on a wooden platform, read aloud from the scroll found in the rubble of their ancient city. For hours they were attentive to what was read. They bowed their heads and worshiped the Lord with their faces to the ground. And they wept.

They wept because it had been so long since anyone in Israel had heard the Word of God. They wept in remorse because they realized how far they had strayed from obeying the Lord their God. They wept for joy as they realized that, even though they had forsaken their God, YHWH had not forsaken them. God had not abandoned them in their forgetfulness and disobedience, and now He was addressing them through these sacred, recovered words of Torah.

In a sense, despite the passage of two and a half millennia, we stand with that people gathered around the Word, even as, today, we stand with another group of people gathered around the Word, this group in a small synagogue in the village of Nazareth nearly 500 years later. It’s a Saturday morning, the Jewish Sabbath. The faithful are gathered for worship at the local synagogue, the place of study and worship found in every community in Palestine by the time of Jesus.

Fresh from his experience of baptism at the hand of his kinsman John and recently having emerged from the temptation experience in the wilderness of Judea, Jesus had come home to Nazareth. The congregation there knew him well, from the time his parents brought him home from Bethlehem through his boyhood, adolescence, and young manhood. They knew Joseph and Mary, his five brothers and his sisters. Jesus had grown up in that small town where everyone is known by everyone else. What’s more, recently, word had filtered down from nearby towns about Jesus’ success as a teacher. The congregation was eager to hear their articulate, passionate, home-town boy on his first visit home after beginning his life’s work.

When Jesus stood up to read, the synagogue attendant handed him the scroll of the prophet Isaiah. Slowly, methodically he opened the scroll to the assigned place, and he began to read. “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me…”

In the back of the synagogue one of Jesus’ neighbors leaned over and whispered to his friend, “Did you hear the way he read that?”

After a pause, Jesus continued with the reading, “…because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor.”

There was more whispering in the congregation this time. Another voice said slightly above a whisper, “He said it that way again.”

Jesus continued to read from Isaiah, “He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”

At that moment it was so completely silent in the room that you could hear a pin drop. It was almost as if the people had stopped breathing. All eyes in the synagogue were on Jesus as slowly he rolled up the scroll, carefully handed it to the attendant, and sat down to comment upon the text he had read. In those days, you see, one stood up to read the Scripture, and then sat down to preach.

The opening line of Jesus’ sermon - a stunning, eye-popping sentence - was this, “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.” In other words Jesus was saying, “I am the one prophesied by Isaiah. I am the one on whom the Spirit of the Lord has come. I am the one whom the Creator God has sent to put the world to rights. In me the long-awaited and prayed-for reign of God upon the earth has begun.”

We must wait until next Sunday to hear Luke describe the surprising and disturbing way Jesus’ neighbors responded to his sermon (and it’s not a pretty picture!), but it will suffice to note that, once again, people had gathered around the Word, and they were met with unexpected and powerful results.

The Word of God is powerful beyond our comprehension. The Bible begins with a defining demonstration of the power of God’s Word. Genesis, chapter 1, verse 1: “In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters. Then God said, ‘Let there be light’; and there was light.” Just by speaking, God creates the world!

On a starry night God spoke to old Abraham and made a promise to him, “Abraham, even though you and your wife Sarah are old as dirt, I am going to make a great people out of you.” At that moment, at the moment of God’s speaking, Israel was created by the Word of God. From a bunch of nobodies, a ragtag collection of Semitic nomads, a great nation came forth as a blessing to all the peoples of the world. From out of nothing, God creates by speaking, by words, by the power of God’s Word!

And what was it that got you and me out of a warm bed on a cold, dreary January morning to come here? It was the Word, Jesus Christ calling each of us to be his disciples, God calling us to be his Church. That we are here at all, you see, is a powerful testimony to God’s Word. It’s Genesis 1 all over again!

But when it comes to describing what brings us into being as church and what holds us together as church, we usually get it wrong. Our needs, our agendas, our commonalities, our family-connectedness, our like-mindedness, our spiritual hungers, the music, the preaching, the programs, the personalities of the leaders, or some combination thereof, these are the things we tend to identify as that which brings us into being and holds us together as church. It’s a common error, but a serious one.  The deep truth of the matter is that God’s Word is the source, the power, and the reason for our being the church.

I’m sure that you have experienced this very thing personally. Haven’t there been times when you have come here feeling overwhelmed, empty, confused, downcast in spirit, anxious, or depressed, and then something happens in you during the service? In the reading of Scripture or the preaching, something happens. It’s as if you hear your name called, as if God claims your attention and speaks to your situation, bringing order out of your chaos, calling you to life, lifting you up, inviting you to a higher purpose, calling forth gratitude and trust, and granting you peace which passes understanding. It has happened here. It may  be happening here right now. It will happen here. It happens whenever and wherever people gather around God’s Word. God speaks, and things happen! Think of it this way: every Sunday is a kind of re-enactment of the first chapter of Genesis when called the world into being through the Word.

I heard a true story from the Nazi occupation of Prague during World War II. The Nazis rounded up all the Jews in the city in their effort to destroy this people and the God they represented. In one of the city’s synagogues, just before the Nazis set it ablaze, they found an old rabbi sitting in his study and working on his sermon for the coming Sabbath’s service. The soldiers sought to humiliate him before they took him away to the concentration camp. They forced him at gun-point to strip naked and had him stand up in his pulpit wearing only his rabbi’s hat. They taunted him, “Say something in Hebrew, old man. Yes, preach to us, preach what you were going to say next service. Preach!”

The rabbi stood there. Soon he began to speak slowly in Hebrew, a language that none of his tormenters could understand. He spoke the words which, time and time again, had constituted Israel, called it into being, made it what it was: “Sh’ma Yisrael, Adonai Elohaynu, Adonai Echad. Hear, O Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is One.” He paused, then continued to speak the Word of God from Torah, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might.”

At that moment the power shifted from the cruel Nazis to the old rabbi. Just in speaking the words from the Bible, the rabbi was dismantling all that the Nazis believed. Nothing they could do, not even their reign of death, could ultimately defeat this God who spoke the world into being, who spoke into being a people to love Him and serve his saving purposes in the world, this God whose Word took on human flesh in Jesus of Nazareth and called us to follow Him, whose Word addresses us when we gather around it to bring light into our darkness and order out of our chaos.

You see, my friends, like the large crowd assembled at Jerusalem listening to Ezra read from the Torah scroll, and like the small congregation gathered for worship in the synagogue at Nazareth listening to Jesus read from the Isaiah scroll, you are a people gathered around the Word. This is the key to understanding who you are and what you are to be about. It is the source of your strength and the basis of your hope for the future. The most important thing for you to know about yourselves as a church, the defining description of who you are, is this: you are a people gathered around the Word!

Let us pray:

O God, whom we are to love with all our heart, soul, and  might, you have spoken us into being. Overcome our resistance, our inability to hear, that we might receive your Word when spoken to us, in order that we might be brought forth from death to life, from darkness to light; for the sake of Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.